Peachy! It’s jam without all the sugar
Preserves can be tedious, frustrating and totally fattening, but if you're able to consume your compotes quickly, you can feast on fast late-summer peach jam and cream biscuits
By Louise Crosby
There’s one way of making jam that involves sterilizing jars, adding pectin, cooking the daylights out of the fruit and possibly sealing the jars with wax. Thankfully for those of us who aren’t up for all that rigamarole but still like the occasional spread of home-made jam on a biscuit hot from the oven, there’s another, much easier way. Granted, you have to eat it up quick or store it in the freezer, but somehow it tastes fresher, less sweet, more like the fruit itself.
Thanks goes to Mark Bittman for this easy recipe for peach or nectarine jam, as published in the New York Times. He adds just the right amount of ginger to not overpower the fruit, and honey instead of sugar. Since 1 1/2 pounds of peaches equals only four good-sized peaches, and you probably bought ...
Buvette meatballs reinvent the reliable orb
Forget all the references to Bill Murray and summer camp because thanks to Jody Williams' Buvette in NYC, meatballs are going upscale as part of the thoughtful food movement
By Louise Crosby
I was thinking the other day how much I love meatballs. Swedish meatballs in gravy served over egg noodles with lingonberry preserves. Middle Eastern meatballs of lamb, cumin and coriander, stuffed into a pita pocket with yogurt and cucumbers. Greek meatballs with feta, mint and lemon. Or regular Italian meatballs in tomato sauce, served over pasta with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. You can take meatballs in so many directions.
Then along came Buvette, a beautiful first cookbook by Jody Williams, who owns and operates a gastrotheque by the same name in New York City’s West Village, a place she describes as a neighbourhood bar “with thoughtful food.” Her recipe for Italian meatballs in tomato sauce came from the grandmother of an unnamed “talented actor from the Soprano...
Spice up the last gasp of summer: Watermelon Gazpacho
Watermelon is a fruit that's also a vegetable, and ingredient that can be exploited for its watery sweetness as well as its ability to play savoury base to a spicy Watermelon Gazpacho
By Louise Crosby
Most of us can remember eating watermelon as kids – at picnics and barbecues and on waterfront docks. It was cold and sweet, a rite of summer. It didn’t matter if the juice dripped down our chins, all over our arms and onto our shirts, it was fun to eat and no one minded the mess.
Fast forward to the other day when I visited my friend Amanda at her home in the woods bordering Gatineau Park, just across the river in Quebec. A great cook, she served me a delicious lunch in her screened-in porch that started with a bright, refreshing watermelon gazpacho, a Lucy Waverman recipe published in Food and Drink magazine. Yes, there are more refined ways of reliving this childhood memory.
Watermelon, by the way, is apparently both a fruit and a vegetable. It is considered a ...
Hey sister, go sister: This is Celeriac Rémoulade
Crunchy and creamy at the same time, celery root salad is a Gallic standard that will make you want more, more, more!
By Louise Crosby
Many summers ago, I studied French for a month at an exclusive language school in Villefranche-sur-Mer, situated between Nice and Monaco on the Côte d’Azur. It was très exotique. Villefranche is a town of apricot and turquoise-painted buildings sloping down to a sparkling blue Mediterranean. People drink crisp, cold rosé wines, lavender perfumes the air, and cicadas buzz in the dry afternoon heat. I did as best I could through the morning language labs and grammar drills, but really perked up when we broke for lunch. That’s because the food was very good.
Of all the delicious homemade dishes we were served, one stands out in my mind, and that is celery root rémoulade, also known as celeriac rémoulade or céleri rémoulade. It was crunchy and creamy at the same time, and I couldn’t get enough of it. You might ...
Making the most of a midsummer harvest
Corn and scallion salad with cilantro-mint dressing can make even the most humble produce sing with an elegant and tangy sweetness, as long as you don't overcook the corn
By Louise Crosby
I’m taking my shopping cart on wheels to the farmers market these days because the vegetables I’m bringing home are large and heavy. It’s August, and the carrots, beets and potatoes are no longer baby-size, the cauliflower and broccoli are hefty, chard comes in big ruffly bundles, and cabbages are the size of footballs. Then of course there is fresh corn, and when you’re hauling home a dozen ears at a time, two or three times a week, you don’t want to be carrying them in your arms.
Corn season is finally here and we’re getting our fill, usually just boiled for a couple of minutes then dressed with butter and the finest sea salt in the world, Fleur de sel de Guérande. As you will know, fresh corn is also delicious creamed and served as a side, added to soups and chowders, and ...
Stay chill with cucumber soup
The coolest member of the humble gourd family makes a refreshingly sweet summer soup that will take the sweat out of summer and keep you hydrated in a tasty way
By Louise Crosby
It’s scorching in Ottawa this week. Temperatures in the 30s, lots of humidity, no breeze. Walking to the store in the middle of the afternoon, I am blasted by the heat shimmering off the sidewalk. It’s mid-summer, after all. This is how it should be.
Personally I like it. If you get the weeding and the errands done early, you can spend the hot hours reading in a cool room. Or you can take in a late afternoon movie with friends followed by dinner out, all in air-conditioned comfort, returning home in time to water the garden in the cool of the evening. Bedtime, you open the windows and put on a fan.
Times like this I make cold soup, in this case cucumber soup, chunks of market-fresh cucumber blended with plain yogurt, lots of mint and dill, hints of garlic, onion and lemon ...
Savouring great memories of Gourmet Magazine
The so-called "New Yorker" of food magazines folded in 2009, but as Louise Crosby discovers, good food never gets old and great recipes deserve to be served
By Louise Crosby
I have a fairly large collection of old Gourmet magazines, 85 issues altogether dating back to March 1980. I keep them stored in cardboard IKEA magazine holders in a closet along with our snowshoes and boxes of Christmas decorations. They’re getting musty, but like so many others in the world who have kept their Gourmets since the magazine folded in 2009, I can’t let them go. They’re historical artifacts. I forget about them most of the time, but when my mother came across an old issue on her bookshelf the other day, and passed it along, it started me on a trip down Gourmet memory lane.
I’m not the first to say that Gourmet was the New Yorker of food magazines, especially in its earlier years, a monthly buffet of thoughtful food writing, travelogues, wine and restaurant reviews, beautiful photog...
Quiche: It’s all in the crust
The famed egg and cheese dish is for real men, real women and anyone who isn't afraid to experiment with leafy greens
By Louise Crosby
When my Mom goes out for lunch, nothing makes her happier than to have quiche, slightly warmed with a bit of salad on the side. She has a point: quiche done well, with a crisp yet tender, flaky crust and a creamy custard filling, is a wonderful thing.
This recipe, part Julia Child and part Martha Stewart, all revised by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen and then tweaked again by me (things do get recycled!) is classic. Leeks are braised with water, butter and salt until they’re soft and sweet, and the mushrooms are sautéed in butter with a splash of port until slightly caramelized. Once cooled, the vegetables are added to the egg-and-milk custard and poured into a baked pastry shell. Swiss or Gruyère cheese is sprinkled on top and into the oven it goes.
I extended the cooking time for the pâte brisée because it’s important that the ...
Affirm a rose-tinted outlook with strawberry lemonade
A day digging in the garden and redesigning the backyard beds demands a thirst-quenching quaff, so squeeze some lemons and squish some berries for a sweet take on a standard
By Louise Crosby
A perfect day for me this time of year starts with a drive south out of the city, a Jesse Winchester rock and roll tune blasting out the windows. I am in a very good mood because I am making yet another trip to the garden centre for another plant specimen, a variety of bush or tree that will have been analyzed to death. How big does it grow? How much sun does it need? Where will it go? The re-design of the back garden, triggered when a large diseased maple tree was taken down last fall, is well underway. I finally have more sun to play with.
So far I have planted the following this spring: a Maypole Colonnade flowering crab, the kind that grow up rather than out in a spread; a Salix Hakuro Nishiki dappled willow standard; a weeping larch; a cute little Bailcarol spirea; a Spring Delight ...
Dispatches from Abroad: 4 Cats, one full stomach
Jay Stone fills up on Barcelona's rich culinary history, where 4 Cats on the menu isn't a PETA call to action, but the promise of tasty delights served on lampshades
By Jay Stone
BARCELONA, Spain -- The two big things to do here are to eat and to go to art galleries, and if you can eat where the painters used to hang out, it's a huge time-saver. This comes in very handy when siesta runs over its limit.
And so we arrive at 4 Cats, a famous cafe on a little alley called Montsio, just off the big Portal de L'Angel, one of the city's main streets. 4 Cats is 118 years old, although it was closed now and then for civil wars, artistic revolutions and so on. Still, it's pretty legendary: a charming bistro with a coffee room in front, a tiled bar in the middle, and a big room in the back with apricot-coloured walls, rows of tables on the floor and a wooden mezzanine that fills up at every meal.
It was opened in 1897 by four painters who were paying homage to Le Chat Noir cabaret in ...
